The exemplary embodiment relates to the image processing, image presentation, photofinishing, and related arts. It finds particular application to the modification of colors of an image to match a selected concept.
The rise of digital photography and digital video has empowered amateur and professional photographers and cinematographers to perform photographic and video processing previously requiring expensive and complex darkroom facilities. Today, document designers can utilize photofinishing software to perform operations such as image cropping, brightness, contrast, and other image adjustments, merging of images, resolution adjustment, and the like on a personal computer. Users also have access to large databases of images through online resources.
The colors of an image can convey an abstract concept to a viewer. An abstract concept can be a particular mood, such as romantic, calm, or the like, which is distinct from the content of the image. Designers sometimes make color adjustments to an image to convey a particular mood. Image processing software provides a wide range of color adjustments, such as color balance, hue, saturation, and intensity, typically with fine control such as independent channel adjustment capability for the various channels (e.g., the red, green, and blue channels in an RGB color space). However, manipulation of image colors can be difficult and time-consuming.
One method for mood-based color transfer is described in Yang, C.-K. & Peng, L.-K., “Automatic Mood-Transferring between Color Image.” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 28, 52-61, 2008 (“Yang and Peng”). This method uses a target image for the transfer, making it difficult for a user to conceptualize the transfer result or to make slight modifications to it. In addition, concepts are each designated by a respective color. The modifications produced by this method yield an image which is dominated by a single color and can only be used for images which satisfy a dominance constraint themselves, limiting the usefulness of the method. Another color modification method, which uses a target palette extracted from a target image, is disclosed in Greenfield, G. R. & House, D. H., “A Palette-Driven Approach to Image Color Transfer,” Eurographics Workshop on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging, 91-99, 2005.
The exemplary embodiment provides a system and method for modifying colors of an image by selecting a concept in natural language, thus making the task much simpler for the non-skilled user.